On second thoughts

November 4 2002

The muckraker: Brock's new book confesses how he falsely smeared Anita Hill, and set out to undo the Clintons.

He made his name - and a fortune - as a warrior for the American Right, its "chief manure spreader", mercilessly pillorying Anita Hill and Bill Clinton. But something very odd happened to journalist David Brock when he set out to do a hatchet job on Hillary. Caroline Overington writes.

David Brock has a story to tell. It is about events that took place more than a decade ago in the United States, but it is an important story. You need to hear it, because it may change the way you think about politics, and maybe journalism.

In the 1990s, Brock was a journalist and author working in Washington DC, and his interest was destroying leading Democrats.

He started with Anita Hill, the professor of law who came forward in 1991 to say she had been sexually harassed by Clarence Thomas, who was then about to take a seat on the Supreme Court bench.

In a widely quoted article that later became the basis of a bestselling book, The Real Anita Hill, Brock did a demolition job on her character. He coined the phrase the Right would use in their frequent diatribes against Hill: that she was "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty". The article and book generated a storm of publicity and a sudden high profile for Brock, who then turned his attention to Bill Clinton, portraying the new president in an article in The American Spectator magazine as a womaniser and serial adulterer. Again, his revelations caused a sensation; they were picked up by The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the wire services. On the day it was published, CNN used Brock's article to lead its nightly news.

Before long, Brock was one of the best-known and highest-paid magazine journalists in the US. ");document.write("

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He used this position to negotiate a $US1 million advance for a book on his next target: the First Lady.

But then, when he sat down to write about Hillary Clinton, he found he could not do it. The more research he did, the more he liked her. The strain of trying to formulate character attacks he didn't believe himself made him literally ill. He started losing weight and losing his hair. Slowly, he began admitting the truth to himself: he, David Brock, was a liar and a jerk. For more than a decade, he had been writing articles based on what he now admits was a "witches' brew of fact, allegation, hearsay, speculation, opinion and invective", labelled as "investigative journalism". In fact, almost everything he had ever written was rubbish.

On his frequent TV appearances in the '90s, David Brock came off as smug and confident. In person, he is small and nervy. He sits on one side of a small, round coffee table at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, by turn drumming his fingers on the table and tapping his feet. He has a packet of cigarettes on the table in front of him, a coffee in his hand.

Brock is here to talk about his new book, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, in which he tries to explain why he sought to destroy the reputations of so many people for so long. The book is the latest in a series of confessional pieces which began with a startling essay he wrote for Esquire magazine in 1997, in which he admitted that "Troopergate" - his expose of Bill Clinton's sexual trysts - was built on wholly unreliable sources. A second article for Esquire offered a public apology to Clinton. But neither of these articles was redemption enough for his sins. Blinded by the Right, for which he was reportedly paid half a million dollars, offers his whole life up for examination, and with it a sorry tale of conservative agendas gone mad. It's a cracking read; whatever you think about David Brock, he knows how to tell a story.

Brock's career in journalism started at the University of California at Berkeley. He chose the school, in 1981, because it had a reputation for liberal activism, established during the protests against the Vietnam War. "Yet my first year was not at all what I had anticipated," Brock writes. "Rather than a liberal bastion of intellectual tolerance and freedom, the campus was politically correct." In his second year, appalled at frequent attempts by liberal students to stifle the voices of Republicans on campus, he took a job as a cub reporter for The Daily Californian, a student newspaper, and began writing right-wing opinion pieces. "By the end of my junior year, I had become a hated figure in the newsroom," he says. One of his articles was picked up by The Wall Street Journal. That led to a job offer from The Washington Times. At the age of 23, he moved to the national capital.

"I could see that those who conformed to the party line got plum assignments and rose through the ranks," Brock writes of his first year in journalism at a newspaper he describes as "infused" with conservative spirit. "The formula came easily to me." Before long, he had been promoted to senior writer, and then to national editor. But he was still looking for a "big break", a story that would make other people sit up and take notice of him. His chance came when he left the Times to write for The American Spectator, a magazine that he now says existed "only to take potshots at the enemy. They rarely questioned the reporting in a piece, so long as it bludgeoned predictable liberal targets." His first assignment was to write a profile of Anita Hill.

Hill came to prominence in Washington with her sexual harassment allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. According to a statement she gave to the Senate, Thomas was obsessed with pornography. Hill said that when she had worked for him at the Equal Opportunity Commission, he would often describe scenes from films he had watched: women having sex with animals, women being raped. He had pressured Hill to see him socially, even though he was married.

Brock remembers seeing Anita Hill give evidence to the Senate. His first thought was: she is telling the truth. But shortly after the Senate hearing, Brock took a call from his editor at the Spectator, who told him that a right-wing supporter of the magazine wanted to give him money to investigate Hill. The editor said Hill's testimony could undermine Thomas's position on the bench. Brock accepted the assignment. His article, which appeared under the headline "The Real Anita Hill", was essentially what journalists call a hatchet job. With little concern for the truth of what he wrote, Brock claimed that Hill was ambitious, kooky and a "man-hater". He said she used to sprinkle pubic hairs through her students' exam papers, and that she often made "bizarre sexual statements" in class. He wrote pages of ridiculous claims about the supposed aggressive sexuality of black women.

As soon as the piece appeared, it found an audience. One of America's highest-rating right-wing talkback hosts, Rush Limbaugh, began reading entire sections of it on air to an audience of more than two million people. "Overnight, every right-winger in America knew my name, or so it seemed," Brock says. "Limbaugh made me famous for calling Anita Hill a slut."

Journalists in the mainstream press were aghast. Two reporters from The Wall Street Journal moved quickly to expose Brock for "pretend[ing] to be neutral, when he's not". Later, when Brock's book on Anita Hill came out, New York magazine published a review, with the headline "Save Yourself $24.95".

The New York Times found fault with Brock's "overwhelmingly one-sided reporting" and a reporter from The Nation suggested Brock's book didn't deserve the subtitle The Untold Story, saying it should have been The Untrue Story. There was no response at all from Hill.

But what did all that matter to Brock, when his book was on the bestseller list and subscriptions were pouring in to The American Spectator? "I had stumbled on something big," Brock says. "We had discovered a formula for selling magazines." And what was that?

A colleague explained it to him: if they wanted to keep their new readers, Brock would have to find "more women to attack".

But first, Brock wanted to go after the President. He got his chance in August 1993, when a contact called to say that some state troopers wanted to "go public" with stories of Clinton's womanising. Brock was a perfect conduit for their tales. He flew to Arkansas and copied down everything the troopers told him: how Bill Clinton had had affairs with seven different women during his marriage to Hillary, plus countless one-night stands. They painted a "wicked portrait" of Hillary, saying she was a "man-hating feminist". In the most vivid anecdote, they described a fight Hillary had had with Bill after she caught him sneaking home one night. Brock described her as screaming, "I need to be f...ed more than twice a year."

Years later, the troopers would recant their stories, and admit that most of it was hearsay, or wishful thinking, or jealousy, but, as Brock says, "I bought it all because I wanted to.

The Anita Hill experience was still fresh in my mind; it had left me on a high. I had slain a liberal Goliath, and I was casting around for my next big prey. That Clinton was the first Democratic president in my adult lifetime made him an inviting target."

And so he wrote "Troopergate", which The American Spectator ran as a cover story, with an illustration of a red-faced Clinton sneaking away from the governor's mansion under cover of nightfall. It was a story so unbalanced, so outrageous, that most mainstream media commentators immediately dismissed it for the "trash" it was. One critic labelled Brock the "chief manure spreader for the Right". Indeed, the piece might have slipped into the dustbin of history, except for one small thing: Brock had mentioned a woman named "Paula" who turned out to be Paula Jones, who decided after the article was published that she wanted Clinton charged with sexual harassment.

"That's what the Republicans wanted all along," Brock says now. "They wanted a chance to question Clinton under oath about his sex life, and Paula Jones gave them the opportunity. They wanted to catch him lying, to set a trap for him, to create a crime where there wasn't one. That idea had been around for years before anybody ever heard of Monica Lewinsky."

But, back in 1993, what did Brock care about that?

"I was having the time of my life," he says. The Spectator's circulation tripled after "Troopergate" was published, and Brock got "a big fat raise - half a million dollars, to be paid out over the next four years". Drunk on fame, money and the thrill of seeing his own byline, he took to strutting around Washington with an "I believe Paula" badge on his lapel. He changed his answering machine to say:

"I am out trying to bring down the President." One night, after he went to bed, he found himself dreaming about carpet-bombing the White House on Christmas Eve. He was, he now admits, "deranged".

But why was he? Brock struggles to explain it. Both in the book and in this interview, he wonders whether it might have something to do with his childhood: he was, he says, a strange kid, who liked to wear three-piece suits to school. He was adopted, and the "secrecy and shame" surrounding his status made him feel insecure. He suffered from skin lesions so severe that his fingers sometimes fused together. Also, from the age of 11, he knew he was gay. He didn't want his parents to find out because he thought his father would reject him. Thinking about it now, Brock thinks he might have been drawn to right-wing politics because he felt "emotionally fatherless" and wanted the support of "father figures" (wealthy, powerful men in tailored shirts) that he found in the conservative movement.

"But at the bottom of my rage, there must have been a loathing not of liberals, but of myself," Brock says. "By giving voice to their hatred of Anita Hill, I was trying to force the conservatives to love a faggot, whether they liked it or not."

There was also the thrill, of course. As Brock admits, attacking Hill gave him money and power and an introduction to "everything I wanted: a warm, secure place in the conservative movement; fame and success as a writer; an identity, as a radical, right-wing outlaw". After Troopergate was published, he was also rich beyond his dreams.

But still he wanted more. His friends in Washington agreed that the logical step from writing about Bill Clinton was to move to the First Lady, an "irresistible target for my next attack book. Like Anita Hill, she was an icon of the feminist movement. Among my audience, she was easily the most reviled figure on the national scene, even more than her husband."

His publisher, Simon & Schuster, agreed to give Brock a $US1 million advance for the book, "although I wrote no proposal. Everyone just understood that I was to follow the lucrative formula of the Anita Hill book, playing to the same prejudices, personal resentments and the misogyny of my market."

Brock remembers his first meeting with a representative of the firm. "He asked me only one question before okaying the $1 million," Brock says. "He wanted to know whether I thought Hillary Clinton was a lesbian."

"Well," Brock replied, with a smirk, "if she is, I'm just the man to find out."

Even as Brock said those words, he knew his hatred of left-wing politics was dying. For reasons he tries to explain in his new book, he had started to loathe many of the people he knew through the conservative movement, and he was becoming appalled by the books and articles he had already written.

"For years in Washington I had leapt out of bed in the morning, seeking the thrill of battle, propelled forward by my mission to defeat the Left," he writes. "Now I was having trouble getting out of bed and facing myself in the morning." Even as he sat on a leather sofa in an exclusive Sixth Avenue office agreeing to write about Hillary, he was thinking: "Is this smirking asshole really me?"

He agreed to the deal for one reason: "I wanted the million bucks." But he found himself unable to perform as he had when attacking Anita Hill.

"I sat at the keyboard literally tearing the hair out of my head," he says. After two years of "retracing every step of Hillary's life, doing more than 100 interviews, collecting virtually every piece of paper that had Hillary's name on it", he found "a kind of beauty" in her. The book he eventually wrote was far more balanced than the one he'd been commissioned to write.

"Friends knew I was wrestling with a dilemma. I was often depressed, and losing weight rapidly, but since they were all in the [conservative] movement, I felt I couldn't tell any of them what was really going on," Brock says. He submitted a draft of his book to his agent, Lynn Chu, and "as she began reading it, I thought I was going to need smelling salts to revive her". As Brock tells it, this was a common response. For weeks after The Seduction of Hillary Rodham was published in 1996, he "hardly heard a word of encouragement from anyone I had known in the [conservative] movement". He claims that former supporters confronted him at parties, shouting that he had "screwed up" the book. On one occasion, a friend "un-invited" him to dinner, saying: "Given what's happened, I don't think you'd be comfortable." Another friend refused to meet his gaze when he saw her at the local supermarket. He was fired from The American Spectator (although this may have been because by this time, by his own admission, he was no longer doing any work).

Brock didn't care about being sacked. "It felt amazingly good to have acted freely," he says. He was no longer in the thrall of the glamorous parties, the networking, the power, the access to right-wing king-makers that his job at the magazine had given him. Besides, he soon found other magazines willing to publish him. (And the experience was "an eye-opening one. I'll never forget the panic that came over me when I received the first call from a fact-checker at New York magazine, asking me to submit my notes for a story. In 12 years of right-wing journalism, my work had never been fact-checked.")

Brock was also starting to think that his hatred of the Left was misplaced. This is not to say that losing all his friends was easy.

"For a long time, I was in a political no-man's-land," he says. "Just me and my smokes. For weeks I did little but sit alone in my house in Georgetown, thinking and reflecting and smoking like a chimney." He contemplated suicide: "I saw myself get up from the sofa, walk into the garage, close the door, climb in the black Range Rover, rev the engine and breathe in deeply. Maybe David Brock, road warrior of the Right, literally should be dead."

But then he thought, no. After all, he had a whole new story to tell. Commissioned by Esquire, he began recanting and confessing. And now, five years later, Brock is sitting at the Four Seasons, shifting his cigarette packet around the table, describing old conservative comrades as fag hags, deadbeats, liars, cheats, hypocrites and misogynists.

Brock's former pals have returned the compliments. Lucianne Goldberg, the publisher who encouraged Linda Tripp to tape her phone conversations with Monica Lewinsky in the trap that caught the President, dismisses his book as "very dishonest".

"He skews things," Goldberg says. "He's unbalanced and angry and kind of pathetic. You know, I'm surprised they are publishing this in Australia. It didn't get much attention here. It's just like: 'Oh, that's just David.' Nobody pays any attention to him any more."

That is not quite true. Brock's book made the bestseller list in the US and has been the subject of several reviews and debates. The writer David Horowitz slammed it on Salon.com, and the Internet publisher Matt Drudge (who broke the story about Monica Lewinsky) has warned his readers that part of it was written while Brock was being treated in a psychiatric hospital. (Brock has heard the rumour. "I haven't responded to it, I won't be drawn now.") And though Drudge and Horowitz could be accused of hypocrisy - they offered no such critique of his former books - it's not just conservatives who are wary of Brock. New York Times columnist Frank Rich pointed out that Brock has lied so often, it is impossible to tell when he is telling the truth.

Brock does have a tendency to over-dramatise. He claims to have been a major player in the politics of Washington in the 1990s. He says he destroyed the credibility of Anita Hill, but, in fact, the Senate had already decided that it didn't believe her when it voted to make Clarence Thomas a judge, two years before Brock's book about her was published. Brock also hints that his Troopergate story was the trigger for the investigation that almost brought down the President, but the stories about Clinton's philandering were around long before Brock's piece came to light. Whatever Brock might have said about him in 1993 was clearly outclassed by what Clinton did to himself.

Brock concedes the argument, but adds: "People say that Clinton gave his enemies the rope to hang him, but I know the story isn't so simple. One of the legal strategists for Paula Jones told me years earlier that the purpose of the sexual harassment suit was to probe Clinton's consensual sex life and then to question him under oath about it. It was a vehicle, to create a crime where one might not have existed. I don't think that makes what I did acceptable. I don't think that what I wrote passes any standards of what you might publish."

Ask Brock about his motive for writing the book and mixed messages emerge. He says he wanted to clear his conscience, and from his melancholy manner, you could assume that he feels a great deal of guilt about profiting so handsomely from destroying people's lives.

But when asked about it, he professes no qualms - not about the money: "Do I feel any guilt? Not so much about that," he says. "No. Not about that." He says the reports of his "great wealth" are exaggerated, although by his own figures he's made at least $US2 million from his former work. (His 19th-century home in Georgetown, which his friends call The House That Anita Hill Built, is reportedly stuffed with expensive antiques.)

It seems fair to ask: does he think he deserves what he has?

"I really haven't thought that much about it," Brock says. "It's so much in the past."

Does he care if Hill forgives him or not?

"Do I care?" he says. "Um. Well, I would hope - although I understand it would be difficult - I would hope she would consider this book some vindication of her original position. But I understand that the damage done to reputations is not easily undone, so if she felt otherwise, I would understand that, too."

Anita Hill, who lives in a neighbourhood close to Brock, did not respond to calls to discuss his book, but, in 1997, she wrote her own book, Speaking Truth to Power. Brock gets a mention on only nine of the 327 pages (he knows this, because he bought the book so he could look himself up in the index). She deals with him coldly, saying that his portrayal of her was based on "fabricated and misquoted sources" and that "he admits never having talked to anybody who was ever close to me".

Brock for his part thinks he has gone "as far as I can go, I think, in trying to undo the damage".

As far as he can go? Brock hasn't even been down the road. He was happy to take more money for this book, and is happy that he now has a new contract to write another one (Brock's next book will be about the Bush Administration and, now that he is a Democrat, it will, of course, be critical). He is back in the limelight, back on the bestseller lists. He gives speeches at Democrat fundraisers. He's even had lunch with Hillary.

But he has never faced Anita Hill. Though he ends his book by musing that he wishes he could make up for what he did to her, his attempts to do so seem a little feeble. He did write her a remorseful letter once, saying that he'd had "second thoughts" about what he said about her in The Real Anita Hill, and offering to discuss it. With considerable grace, Hill called him back, but the call went through to voicemail. He never returned it. It seems fair to ask: why not?

"I don't know," Brock says, looking at the table.

"I mean, I wrote her last summer, and since then, I sent her the book. I didn't hear anything back. But a copy of this book was sent to her."